cottrell@nbs-vms.ARPA (03/05/85)
/* I'm getting pretty damn sick of this righteousness on this network. Everyone is a sinner. Everyone draws his own lines. Remember the words `Government {for,by,of} the People'. That means I have some say in it too. There is all kind of unenforcable illegal malarkey in written contracts. They're just trying to intimidate you into doing what they want. Remember, if you have source, you PAID for the RIGHT to look at it. You don't have the right to copy it & claim it as yours, but anything you learn is your own experience. What if you had previously delved into UUCP to fix a bug, & found decided, "wow, this is really a mess, there's got to be a better way". By then your mind would be `polluted' with trade secrets, & you would be ethically bound not to rewrite it. Hogwash. I said there is a happy medium. I agree that the spirit of the law should be obeyed. I will therefore agree of my own free will that I will not make money off TPC's (or anyone elses) code. But if I need cpio on BSD, I will port it. I did, so sue me. If Lauren is as smart as people say (& I believe so), he is doing the rest of us a disservice my shooting in the dark. Take a few peeks at existing code & build on that instead of reinventing the wheel. jim cottrell@nbs */
ron@BRL-TGR.ARPA (Ron Natalie) (03/05/85)
What I expect, some one else was trying to say (Farber?) was that UNIX algorithms, probably wouldn't hold up to the trade secret test. They were really innovative several years ago, but whole books have been published on operating system ideas such as those in UNIX. HOW UNIX works is not a secret. I would expect that while a court test would protect AT&T's source, the algorithms would not hold up. Even IBM (which only copyrights their code) does not discourage the theft of their algorithms. -Ron